Friday, December 2, 2011

Phones

Another hoop outa the way. We finally bit the bullet and
went and bought phones. Ok, that was never the initial intention, but after
visiting the SFR store (a particular phone company), we somehow each walked out
with our own little shopping bags. The way it works, usually, is that students
from the previous year sell their phones to the incoming students. Seeing that
there were a few unclaimed after the students had their pick, Adam snagged two
for us. We charged them up only to see a message saying our SIM Cards were
invalid, and had thrown those aside for the past month thinking, ahhh we’ll
figure this out later. Yesterday, we
finally made the leap. Stepping into a rather B.O. infested SFR store, we
showed a salesman that our phones didn’t work…saying we needed new SIM Cards.
He said something to the effect of, yeah, they’re no good. And I asked, so can
we just buy new SIM Cards? He made some comment, and then brought us over to
the new phones. Adam said he had understood something to the effect that if the
phone hadn’t been used for 6 months, then it was no longer useable. I was skeptical,
but followed the man. I wasn’t really sure how to refute this. Mind you, this
was all in French, the gentleman speaking long fluent sentences with us
stuttering stupid phrases. You’d be skeptical, too. So we picked out the
cheapest of the texting phones, bought some minutes, slipped around getting
sucked into a contract, then continued on our merry ways getting the things
fired up. That man said a lot that night that flew right over my head, and that
made me nervous, which made my French turn from bad to worse. For awhile, there
was a long awkward standoff between all three of us as the man kept saying
something about a ‘code-pin’….which sounds just like the French word for
‘friend’, ‘Copine’. It just didn’t click with us. God this language is impossible
sometimes! So yeah, from smart phones back to dumb phones feeling even dumber
at the phone store. For all we know, we could’ve just been ripped off. But hell,
sometimes it just feels better to say whatever… at least that’s outa the way!